Irrlicht - Good choice for architectural walkthroughs?

[Weetie]

I'm thinking about using Irrlicht for architectural & planning presentations. All I want to do is bring in a bitmapped terrain, low poly buildings & trees, & do walkthroughs. There are two complicating factors:
1. I need to be able to easily switch buildings on/off as I talk about different options with clients
2. Most projects need the terrain to be pretty detailed. The terrain model is usually 200-300k faces. Can Irrlicht handle a really high-poly object like that (with high res bitmapping)? Should I chop the terrain into smaller pieces?
Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[skumar]

hi,
Im also a person like you developing some architectural presentation software with Irrlicht. But i dont use terrain.I think Irrlicht can load big terrains...

About presentation settings,like making buildings on an off - is surely possible by moderate programming.

The following is a link to my first demo...simply basic modelling dont have much things...(23k polys)

http://www.mediafire.com/?21julvt9v0m

bye

[jontan6]

i have a scene with 600-800k polys and runs ok on 9800. around 20-30fps

[zillion42]

me too ! tryig to make architectural walktroughs mainly focusing on interior scenes though... Preferably switching lightmaps by clicking lightswitches, day and night setups, etc.
I model and lightmap in maya, using a 2TCoords mesh, meaning it has 2 seperate UV sets in maya. My friends work with cinema4d which somehow seems unable to incooperate 2 UV sets, but exporting 2 seperate .obj or .x meshes with same amount of vertices is a workaround...

terrains are merely a background effect for me... But who knows, maybe I'll have to do some outside scenes in the future. Really depends on your customers I guess. A reasonable FPS camera with good working collisions is another issue for me so far... Anyhow I'm quite happy there is some people with similar interests here. So again, code sharing is highly appreciated...

[jontan6]

i think for walkthrough, you can demain high end card. no need for running on slower cards like games do.

[skumar]

HI,
So people of similar interests meet!!!!

My aim is a commercial service,which i am about to start, called vrwalking(www.vrwalking.com). I have learned a lot from this forum and from my experience. Irrlicht can do wonders, if we use some shaders also.

My tech demo...in the previous post in this thread is my first and its simple.I have gone far beyond that and i will post the new demo in some weeks...

I am doing the lightmapping in 3ds max and i have done a tutorial on lightmapping

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... highlight=

Im also doing mainly interiors.But the main problem im encountering is the reflections of the floor and mirrors in scenes.

Floor reflections can be easily done by inverting the mesh and making the floor transparent. Zillion42...do you have any new idea for this???????

Try posting the tech demos of such work if possible....that can mobilize the whole development.

I am planning to release my product in newyear month....

[zillion42]

@ skumar
the first thing that came to my mind was using a shader for reflections... then searching the forum I found your thread

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... reflection

so to keep things in the threads they belong I post the rest in your thread, we kind of drifted off from huge terrains anyway...

[Weetie]

i have a scene with 600-800k polys and runs ok on 9800. around 20-30fps

jontan - what kind of system are you running that on? Do you have any bitmapping or raytracing?

If you're getting good performance with 6-800k polys that gives me hope that I can get mine to work. Do you have your terrain modeled as one high-res object, or did you break it into smaller pieces? Do you have multiple resolution copies of objects for near/distance viewing?

[hybrid]

I've just recently checked the terrain node with VBOs enabled, and it can easily handle 1mio polys even with dynamic LOD on my notebook (some ATI mobility chip). So if you only have static objects of that size it shouldn't be too much of a problem. You can increase the FPS by manually splitting the huge objects into several parts for better frustum culling, because ATM it's not possible to combine VBOs and Octrees (which could handle the splitting automatically).